I've gotten seven Nigerian style scam messages and one phony lottery winnings scam within the last 24 hours. Of course, I've forwarded each one to uce@ftc.gov, and perhaps they'll take care of them. The last 24 hours of spam from scammers is a bit unusual. I've gotten one occasionally, but I haven't gotten more than a few in a day for a long time.

Has anyone else been getting a lot of these financial scam emails over the last day or so?

Re: Pharmaceuticals

I've been getting it by the boatloads at work. Probably 20 a day. Damn few get by SpamAssassin. On my "home" server I don't even see 95% of it, since I'm more willing to block by wholesale than you can do with a corporate site....

Most of it breaks down into bank fraud, 419 scams, drug pushers, and stock "pickers", the usual crap. I think the bank fraud is by far the most common these days, and is going up.

That's what I see at work, for the most part. This latest burst of Nigerian style scams (We need an American partner to help us claim all this money) has been at home. It seems like too many all at once to be a coincidence.

It's a Jungle in Here.

These aren't common enough for me to get too excited about, at home, and at work, I don't have the control (for long, at least) I need to be able to fix it. Some brain-dead person chose Lotus Notes as the corporate email system, and while I'm one of the last holdouts with a rogue, independent POP account, even that is likely to change, soon. I work for a very large company. This has advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that departments tend both to defend their turf and to make their turf easier to take care of by controlling the range of options that their customers can use. Email is such a turf, and it's controlled by a different department. Up to now, we've controlled the Unix systems which function as central mail gateways, even if that other department controls Lotus Notes and it's server side software on our boxes, and we've had some justification for keeping our pop accounts as a way of receiving postmaster notices when our sendmail instances are having trouble relaying to Notes. The company is moving toward appliance based email handling, so we are about to lose that flexibility, also.

Of course, even before this is finished, Notes has never given me meaningful control over the spam I receive there.